Healthcare

 

I wonder about it, what will happen, how and when. I've kinda opted out of the debate. Don't quite know how to do it. (debate, attend to it) A friend challenged me on it toady. It's interesting, I've become "uncovered" or "self insuring" as I think of it. I accept that my finances are best managed by myself and that if I need and cannot receive critical care here, perhaps I can afford it in India or Mexico, and if not, I will die. I accept the simple reality: we all die.

 

And I started wondering. I've intuitively known that at some point fending off death is merely a delaying tactic.  Holding onto decaying health after this point is an economic and legal issue as well as moral. If we are to come to some reasoned settlement on social security for the public we must also accept that we have limited resources, and that as population increases, this will be exacerbated. This means people die. They die when insurance companies stop paying, and we will die when our government cut's its losses as well. Its reality and we behoove ourselves to accept it with dignity and aplomb.

 

Yet this invitation to accept the transient nature of life, and more importantly the naïve and particularly american fantasy of empire and freedom from not only terrorists, dissention but death itself is a wonderful paradoxical opportunity for exploration of life, and the further enjoyment of it, knowing it is but a passing fancy.

love no dog from hell

Love dog

 

It's a dog of love

This love the dog

You love the dog

And you wish it

Would die times

Like these you

Remember why

Smiling is our

Natural state

And then again

Later, a bit maudlin

Perhaps in age

Forgot to cry.

do it much again

Later.

it’s all vanity

sitting on the shitter
thinking I’d like to have the
two or three initials after my name
like my sister's or my mum's or da'
some personal failure made socially
relevant, not being in the wider healing
professions. Yet profess I do, constantly,
except when deeply asleep, or the verge of love,

even with myself

no more separation between good and failure.
doing and not collapse.

Just watch the dog.

Sleep in the yard, not waiting for the sun, simply sleep.
Watching the sky, incoming photic messages thousands of years old,
too see that which is emitted rather than reflected~no distinction in perception exists
listen to the silence at three am late evening in Hawaii, something still, is alive.
are we any different in our Ballardesque media consumption
apparently lacking almost all public attention of alternative
assumptions, rather than sand over air. not even turtles all the way down.
Class struggles are sharpened by perceptions
not our hearts desire

While at the Park

It’s suburban paradise in Marin. I went with the dog to the park today. We met 6 neighbors.
All drawn by Amma. the kids wanted to pet and love on her, as she is especially beautiful whilst running and jumping for the ball. Four of them ran from 4 to 7 and an equal mix of boys and girls, and two adults, much the same, all unique, the older of us, likely a bit more curmudgeonly, than the younger.

Yet one of them was unique. Everyone was quite pleasant, and polite, even the reluctant old socialite. What was odd was the love and attention they gave. The young one who after petting the dog, somehow snuck around to my blind side and started calmly proceeded without comment to pet me! Naturally, matter of factly with authority, petting my shoulder and bicep. It was so incredibly intimate and sensuous, as distantly, publicly, she managed to stroke my soul.

I did turn and look at her, but she ignored me and I went back to listening to her friend complete her detailed life up to here story including; how she and her dog were both 7 and had been together their entire lives, relating her twin had died at birth. Somehow all this seems so ordinary, like the tearful little boy, relating how his dog, had died. I just stared at the other adults, none of said a word.

Stuck momentary awake in the beauty of the day, the sun after days of rain. The kids teaching us, being bodhisattvas, gods and poets. I left unaware or in some strange shock by witnessing their shimmering beauty. Whose attention moved with absolute grace, “like goldfish”, from moment to moment with perfection.

Work

Got loaded in and rough sanding, just loved ~ hated it, so nice to be a workin joe.
God blue collar, dirty tee shirt, skilled labor is a grace I forgot. I’ve been laid off for too long, such pleasure in
just getting back to the regurlar abrasive grind I love it. After almost thirty years it is both an avocation, vocation, art, therapy and, perhaps, repentance. There is a subtle craft based superiority of making lasting objects of utility and beauty that can, with care, last many generations. I suppose it’s kind of like writing a book that actually becomes a classic, like the old man’s, I do aspire to that as well. I guess, what with luck and grace, the world does not end. The floors I’ve laid with love, some of them, will last to be appreciated and loved,

What is success ?

"Success" is a painfully amorphous chimera, especially in the current global context. Does it mean the successful ministering to the world or the exploitation thereof? And what is successful "ministry"? Whether nursing, or feeding, or healing, the less fortunate so that they (or we) can eek out a life under the radar of the ruling elite without either rocking the boat or suffering unduly?

Of course it depends on one's perspective and how "identified" one is with the self, and the particular agenda that comes with "belief" of perspective and experience. Unfortunately it has rarely been my experience of academic education as an examination of beliefs or facts, rather a very costly vocational training program for system management combined with economic exploitation of the student and faculty, while distracted by social networking opportunity for job placement of the pseudo elite, who perhaps still believe in the plausibility of economic or social security.

I found Chris Hedges book, Empire of Illusion quite edifying and readable. Although, at times i think he tends to belabor a point. He ends with the rather grim prediction that the American economy has been looted and systematically destroyed by the corporate and banking elite which owns the judicial and executive branches of government. I am truly grateful not to have children that will die in such a long slow economic depression that we are just entering with much denial and obfuscation.The likes of which have not been seen in at least 80 years and likely worse than anything in recent history since Nazi Germany, with less hope of salvation by an idealistic oposition. I have no doubt that our primary export (weapons of mass destruction) will eventually return to our own shores to exact their karmic due, whether wielded by our own military or not.

I have lived a life of rare experience. Witnessing beauty and love, as well as depression, pain, and travail. If I have a personal concept of success it is to live and die with beauty while balancing the capacity for self condemnation with forgiveness for not being a successfully "heroic" figure, tempered by the awareness of how I am still caught in a mythology that died decades ago.

I don't have much hope for america or the world, much less myself, and yet acknowledge that i may do some small accidental deeds of beauty or compassion for others and the world. I'm uncomfortable aware that my very existence is a drain on the environment and feeds the coffers of the very corporations I oppose so impotently . It is a challenging existential exercise to justify ones own existence. Perhaps it does not require justification. I do still experience joy and gratitude so life is experienced mostly as a blessing, for what i do not know. . .

Hedges on corporate power

I find myself imagining him somehow optimistic.
It is not our ignorance or greed that fails us.
It is our perfect vulnerability to what is called evil,
What always underlies: an aspect of inhumane nature.

We live to kill, to consume, to fuck and again, kill.
Rape, consume, exploit all the while we (or "they")
manufacture our consent for our own slavery.
Or with cruel spite fucks with coke & all of us whores
for casual violence. Arms laden international environment
of corporate death.While we appear “entertained”

We act as if this was not going on for the past 200 years.
And rightly or insane as ghetto Jews we argue against
violence as our brothers sharpen their knives
and no longer pretend to smile. . .

I remember being a child in the 70’s
knowing with certainty that our destruction
started long before I was born, the seeds of our
callous failure of humanity lie in the imperial
past, in the roots of empire the rot is there. In
slavery, in genocide and from the old lands we brought
them here.God knows the our own debt,
slavery and karma of the local people,
we are venal in our souls
I’m both ashamed.

Rant

What gives value, if not uniqueness, but commonality? Our capacity for loving; (even if it's coffee, whiskey or taco's). The opportunity to reflect, the inherent freedom of awareness. Every unpredictable moment that precludes safety, yet is pregnant with opportunity. We may purse a shared disillusion of the individual into a "greater self", yet some struggle with the ego and the surrender of "I".

Yes, I wonder if appreciation is predicated on vulnerability. Or is it simply grace? The tragic failure is to not pursue our dreams, but to remain never waking or immediately nodding off as a dazed heroin addict will, as you let him know the house is burning down. One persons death is a tragedy yet thousands of dead children are a statistic.

Our human capacity to respond and transform the world remains blocked in the most basic expression. We cannot take care of our own shared sentient beings. We instead turn further inward toward artificial realities based on illusion of: media, availability, sustainability and joy. Endlessly repeating violent images coupled to the the manufacture of consumer desire we have blinded ourselves to the global totalitarian regimes we create to sustain our cannibalistic consumption of our very biosphere, planet and souls.

The Sacred and Profane are a false opposition. A limited perspective of War rather than Peace. When we separate humanity we embrace a dark "psychotic split" in life which reflects in the biosphere, the market place, our home and foreign our relations.

War is our greatest lover and will be our last addiction i fear. Until we desire and demand abstinence, until give our own violence surrender. Until the day we balance our populations with resources and care, we grow inexorably closer toward to the demise of the our environment, values, and existence of human love and piety.

While we remain in a have and have not society we fuel the tension and lust of goods & privilege access to justice, and equality. What passes for pleasure is mostly distraction and intoxication, for the pseudo spiritual this is silence or absence of awareness and any emotional tone of the biosphere is in it death throes.

When most open, vulnerable and Surrendered we witness our Kafkaesque yet Kali driven participation in the sorrows and death of the world. It is the very experience of adolescence and the waking or extinction of the nascent capacity for loving response as a sundered scion of the psyche of truth.

Our society posits the opposite. It is the obligation (that I often shirk) for the reflective being to jostle his neighbors awake as the ship of state is nearing the reefs of totalitarianism and collapse that is implicit in the myth of Empire and reality of “free market” capitalist plutocracy. What does this "mean" this supposed, posited yet unproven capacity for shared experience? And what does communication mean or offer as a tool or capacity for charging the world? How much is this a delusional distraction from what simply is; life, death, pain, joy, anxiety, and silence. Is that the "silence" we mystics pranam too, is that also the silence of the grave?

My friends ask me? How does one awakened the dammed on a ship of fools? I can only suggest to watch for what opportunity offers itself. The arise every day if not moment. It is not our enemies we have to fear, it is our own incapacity to act in each moment as the opportunity consistently appears.